Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on pregnancy etiquette, saving the hare and what have the Romans ever done for us?

Etiquette corner.

Published
Doomed?

Can it be true, as some sources reported, that the Queen and other senior royals were told about the Harry/Meghan pregnancy on Friday "when members of the Royal Family gathered in Windsor for Princess Eugenie's wedding"? Surely not. You don't have to be royalty to know it's the most shocking bad manners to do anything at a wedding that distracts from the bride's big day.

ONE of my earliest memories of growing up in Herefordshire was the arrival of a wild rabbit, complete with hutch, who stayed with us for a few months. The reason for this new arrival was myxomatosis, a truly horrible disease which was deliberately spread in 1953-4 by putting infected rabbits in burrows. In some parts of England, virtually all the rabbits were wiped out. The scourge may have protected crops but it deprived post-war austerity Britain of a popular meal. Our rabbit was part of a breeding and re-stocking programme in Kington. By the time he died he had fathered a dynasty, if I remember correctly, of 6,000 rabbits.

I MENTION the Kington Rabbit for two reasons. The first is that as I was only four at the time, I may have got it all wrong. Does anyone remember a rabbit re-stocking project? The second reason is that myxomatosis has recently spread to England's population of brown hares. Some experts fear they could be wiped out. If rabbits can be caught, caged, bred and released, why not hares? And why not start now before these graceful, mystical creatures vanish?

LIFE imitates art. And sometimes art imitates art, but not very well. In the vast jungle of goodies that is Netflix, I stumbled across the 2015 bible epic AD: Kingdom and Empire. It is a sandals-and-toga saga which shows how The Life of Brian might have turned out if the Monty Python team had made it as a documentary. Some scenes are seemingly lifted straight from the 1979 comedy classic, but with all the funny bits removed. The raggedy street beggar is a dead ringer for Michael ("Spare a talent for an old ex-leper") Palin and there's even a re-run of the iconic "What have the Romans ever done for us?" scene. But it's all done very seriously. No-one even mentions the aqueduct.

A READER makes the point that by campaigning for more world trade, Brexiteers are making global warming worse. Maybe so. But nobody on the Remain side is campaigning for less world trade, are they?

TRUTH is, all politicians are obsessed with growth and travel and those who stand up against it get nowhere. Every general election is contested by a handful of planet-saving zealots with a vision of a clean, green, caring world where we weave bicycles out of tofu, and barter pulses for turnips in village markets run by communes. They never get elected. There are no votes in lentils.